Because the light is better here

[womzilla]

james_nicoll asks a fairly straightforward, unfraught question:

How did Richard Nixon manage to get elected as President in the timeline we see in Watchmen?

Notice the number of respondents who answer a question James did not ask--"How did Nixon stay in office until 1985?"

The second question is more directly addressed in the comic than the first one is, though an answer can be ferreted out, which is why I titled this post what I did.

(My answer to James's question is this:

The first public demonstration of Dr. Manhattan's abilities in 1960 did put him in a military context (destroying a tank). However, the implication in Dr. Glass's essay (the text piece to issue #4) is that Kennedy and LBJ thought or feared that using Manhattan for small conflicts would be an escalation that the Soviet Union would consider comparable to using nuclear weapons.

Midway through his first term, Nixon, the "mad bomber", deployed Dr. Manhattan despite that consideration. The gamble paid off, and Nixon won easy re-election in 1972.

)

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

No, it was just me using a title that signifies only to myself: it's my metonym for "people will address the questions that they can answer even if they're not the questions that are asked".